What are your thoughts on finding a good level of subscriptions for online services, such as storage, photo backup, music streaming, video streaming?
Personal situation: I don’t want a ton of subscriptions. I take lots of photos. I listen to music quite a bit. I live in a household that has Android, iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Linux, … and a Synology NAS that is already filling up with old music and video stuff from before streaming, phone photo backups as well as the photos from the big camera (manually copied so far). I currently pay for two cloud storage thingies and have to free ones, 3/4 are full :P We also have Spotify Family and cut down to only (HBO) Max and public service for video plus sometimes getting something specific for a month or two.
Any experiences or other observations welcome as well!
I live in a household that has…a Synology NAS that is already filling up with old music and video stuff from before streaming
Why wouldn’t you just add more storage to your NAS?
That usually involves replacing drives, and drives get expensive fast. Synogy and all the other NAS makers won’t make a >4 bay NAS without charging an arm and a leg for them. Then there’s the cost of replacing a perfectly good hard drive with another of a large capacity. And because you want redundancy that doesn’t mean just one drive, that meant at least 2 possibly all 4 drives.
So far the NAS is not reachable from the internet and knowing how many threats lurk out there I’m sort of happy with that. I still want to do backups as well es find photos when I’m e.g. visiting family or simply traveling.
This answer is very different depending upon your life circumstances.
A single person with fixed income, is different than a two income household with children. I’m not saying they can’t both reach the same conclusion, just at their circumstances justify different choices being valid.
There’s also your technical proficiency, and pain tolerance for saving money.
For example, you could eliminate all external services, self-host everything, and then configure an S3 object storage provider for critical cold storage backups. That might also require you spending a bit more upfront to expand your NAS storage capacity.
What’s convenient for you? What can you not afford to lose access to? What’s your budget? How much time do you have to manage different solutions?
Those aren’t questions for you to provide me answers for, just some of the considerations that will impact different people’s answer to this question.
I suggest enlarging your current NAS or building one and running something like Open Media Vault, Umbrel, CASA, etc.
For streaming, Kodi is the best value though it’s via pirating. But is pirating such a bad thing when these companies steal your data and revoke movies that you purchased? With a debrid service costing $17 for 6mo you can stream basically anything with no slowdowns. Run Kodi via LibreElec on a RPi5.
Actually have Jellyfin running on the NAS and am starting to get back into “in-home streaming” - but I also want to maybe stream a show while traveling.
